State of the Discussion

I think that might be another take that's becoming dated. There's always a conversation to be had about the ROI for the marginal student and/or the marginal school. That issue was a lot more acute with the glut of students during and in the years following the great recession. My understanding is that one upside of a full employment economy is that it was driving a correction. More jobs, even not great ones, meant fewer students of the kind most likely to fall through that sort of gap. Pity Trump seems hell bent on reversing it.

The more important questions I think revolve around whether colleges have no choice but to require the students that want to attend class to accommodate the never ending Palestine party, as it obstructs walkways and open spaces, or worse periodically paralyzes educational or administrative functions by occupying buildings or engaging in other disruptions. It can be added to long standing questions about whether it really is a good idea to have some Dean of student life equipped with the latest in feminist thinking investigate alleged felony sex crimes among the student body, run admissions departments as thinly veiled probably illegal racial balancing bureaucracies, and threaten the STEM departments with sanction if they refuse to lower their standards because someone somewhere might be upset about the demographics of the class and/or professoriate.

Are there any good ideas used to set and develop policy that aren't misused and abused by people on social media? Like, man, you should read some of the sh*t I've seen people say about Hayek, pretty much everyone on social media has forgotten the important stuff about Smith (but so have the policy people, so...), and dear god, what the techies have done to Parfitt and others in the service of "longetermism" and "effective altruism." I suppose you don't see much social media perversion of Rawls, but that's mostly because you don't see much social media discussion of Rawls.

I think this is true of virtually any serious philosophical, political, or scientific ideas, though. I don't know what it says about them other than that they are difficult to master and most people are intellectually lazy.

"According to the Constitution, so long as you are elected, not born overseas, have lived in country for fourteen years, and are at least thirty-five years old, you can be president. That’s it. There’s no “of sound mind and body” clause for good anti-schemer reasons. If being out of touch – slightly or full-blown Jello Pudding smeared and calling everyone “Frieda” – were any type of disqualification we wouldn’t have need for the 25th Amendment and all it’s increments."

The lede was buried good and deep in this one.

Well, it's like the difference between CRT (pure theory) and CRT by the time it goes through the telephone game and comes out the other side in the form of social media posts.

Critical Theory? It might be awesome if we limited the game to Bertrand Russell and thereabouts.

But anyone can play and, good lord, they do a better job of turning people off of it than their fiercest critics do.

You’ve got some of them getting hired as they walk off the stage and others who walk off the stage and walk across the street and join a protest demanding student loan relief.

I mean, good for them if they do, but I don't think you have many students going straight into intentional unemployment unless they have enough money that student loans probably aren't an issue.

A parallel question is "What are universities actually doing?"

How far from what we want them to be are they?

Looking at what they actually do gives us a handful of different answers... the administrators do one thing, the professors another, the TAs yet another, the librarians have their own fiefdom, and the students are as diverse as their majors.

You've got some of them getting hired as they walk off the stage and others who walk off the stage and walk across the street and join a protest demanding student loan relief.

The crazy thing is that out of all of the things that we want the University to be, one of the top three is "sustainable" and... well, whatever we have now, doesn't seem to be sustainable.

My assumption is that people mean "critical theorist" when they say "Marxist" these days.

The folks in charge of running the university have a different set of goals ("maintain endowment", "grow endowment") than the people teaching the courses ("teach math", "teach LGBTQ dance theory"), and those are different than the goals of the students themselves ("chase tail", "get good job when I graduate, I guess").

The problem is that there are a handful of really bad actors who have screwed everything up for everybody and the landscape of universities will look significantly different in a generation and in the bad direction. Smaller, fewer students, more emphasis on employment prep than life of the mind.

They sold their birthrights for a mess of pottage.

Of course it’s Trump running his mouth. But that’s different than any other day how?

I also don’t think Biden making an announcement now is going g to do anything to refute this for the people
Who believe he didn’t know the first time - his statement form the WH on issuing these not withstanding. They want him to be one and doddering and senile and out of touch no matter what the truth is.

While I think there are plenty of faculty at universities large and small whose own academic work is terrible, and virtually all university faculty teach from a particular perspective, some of which are better, or more flexible, than others, I genuinely believe that the general public's view of the university as "ideologically captured," or overrun with "postmodernism" (as a general rule, the more a person uses that word, the less they understand it), are wildly blown out of proportion. In fact, I think something very different is happening at universities, in some ways the exact opposite of what so many people ignorantly (as in, they don't actually know what's going on at universities) criticize for: 1) The ever-increasing size of university administration, and in particular, upper-level administration, which is both a financial burden to the universities and pretty significantly alters the way universities function; 2) The philosophy of university administration, which has increasingly dominated university administrations and boards since the 90s, of treating the university like a corporation/business generally, which has also changed the way universities function, and resulted in an increased focus on schools, departments, majors, and even individual faculty who have a good "R.O.I.", particularly those that increase post-graduation salary numbers (STEM for the last decade or two, but also business, science, econ, and the practical majors); 3) related to both (1) and (2), the increased adjunctification of the university, so that whereas people who freak out about universities are freaking out about some tenured professor somewhere they heard about on the internet, who is teaching undergrads radical ideas, most of the professors kids will actually have, especially at state schools, will be low-paid adjuncts who have absolutely no job security or academic freedom, and generally toe whatever line the department/administration wants them to or risk losing their poorly paid, over-worked position.

If you want to fix universities differently, and have them produce better, more well-rounded educations, instead of focusing on "pomo" professors and Marxists*, you'd focus on those 3 things, which are rapidly destroying universities as they existed even when many of us were there (for me, that's the mid-to-late 90s, when people were already lampooning them as P.C.U., but still).

*If you have never seen the Zizek-Peterson debate, I recommend not watching it, but there is a funny moment in which Zizek asks Peterson to name some Marxist professors, and of course, Peterson is unable to do so. Then Zizek says he knows of two (one of whom was David Harvey; I can't remember the other). I know of maybe half a dozen in the U.S. (more elsewhere), and I suspect Zizek knows at least that many, but of the half a dozen I know of, none excluding Harvey actually teach Marxism or from a noticeably Marxist perspective. One of the ways that American universities have failed so many is in not teaching them what Marxism is, which means for so many of y'all, Marxism is merely a poorly seen and completely misunderstood spectre haunting academia.

Probably should have Biden announce that he approved all those pardons while he's still able to.

Also I strongly expect this was more Trump running his mouth than any sort of legal evaluation.

So once again you don’t see the righting of the past institutional wrongs that denied women, people of color and religious minorities an education as a core mission of public universities. Got it.

Joe Rogan was mocked for talking about having been prescribed Ivermectin and taking it as prescribed.

There was also a movement to have his show taken off of Spotify entirely.

He's not an academic, though.

The propaganda tools that the 21st century authoritarians have are a lot greater than that of the 20th century regimes. Goebbels would have loved social media and YouTube. Just an easy way to lead people down the rabbit hole.

Because that’s the debate being forced on us now.

No, Jaybird, it's the debate _you_ are choosing us to have.

If you think it's absurd, you had a chance to comment on that WHEN YOU INTRODUCED IT.

Stupid enough for NPR to deal with them.

There's also the NYT and BBC but, honestly, you're not going to click on those any more than you clicked on the NPR one.

The issue isn't "is the autopen sufficient for a pardon?" because OF COURSE IT IS.

The issue of "did Biden direct these pardons personally?" is troublesome because the possibility exists that he didn't is a larger possibility than "and monkeys might fly out of my butt" due to Biden's severe cognitive decline.

"There is no reason to believe that Biden didn't know about these pardons" is a better argument when there is no reason to believe that Biden didn't know about those pardons.

“The implication that the Imperius Curse was used to procure these pardons is preposterous!”

You know, I actually typed this and deleted it in another post, but there is literally no way to invalidate a pardon if the president has granted it, and I mean the word literally literally.

For the harshest example, if a president grants a pardon at gunpoint, it is still a granted pardon and can be used. It cannot be revoked or invalidated. This may seem Obviously Wrong, but it is not.

The pardon power is almost entirely absolute, exempting only impeachment or state law violations. It used to be slightly restricted by the idea we could prosecute a president who misused it, like selling pardons, until the Supreme Court said no. So now, as long as it's on a violation of Federal law, that presidential power is literally unchecked and absolute. It's even uncheckable, after the fact, by the person who used it!

I think that it signals the weakness of the position instead of its strength.

"How dare people in a discussion forum point out every level of what Trump is trying to do is complete and utter bullsh*t instead of just picking one!"

Gee, I don't know, could it be that Trump _himself_ introduced two different arguments, one about the way they were signed, and one about Biden not knowing about them?

Could it be that this is, in fact, exactly how this administration operates, a gish gallop of nonsense that moves from one thing to another, constantly falling back from nonsense position to different nonsense position, and it's worth pointing out preemptive how it's _all_ nonsense from top to bottom, and in fact Trump not only does not have the legal power to question pardons, he does not even have the _ability_?

Could it be that is all extremely stupid?